Now more than half a year has passed, since Typhoon Haiyan / Yolanda hit the Philippines. Our friend and supporter Geert Gijs has recently visited Manila, Tacloban and Palo to monitor the recovery. Indeed, the typhoon has triggered many activities - and it is good to see that part of the efforts of DSWD, OCHA and other agencies are dedicated to learning such as in the SIIEM project. DSWD has invited for an Inter-Agency Forum on Increasing Availability, Quality and Accessibility ofCommon Operational Datasets to Support Disaster Risk Reduction apd Emergency Management in the Philippines, a project that has been supported by DRL in cooperation with MapAction.

Our leading question in this effort is: if we cannot avoid that natural hazards strike, how can we reduce the consequences?

In the past weeks, the DRL team has been sharing the impressions from our field research with our crowd funders in a Webinar, we have discussed our findings with the colleagues at our institutes, and presented at the Humanitarian Technology and ISCRAM2014 conferences.

Practitioners. Our work can only be relevant if we engage in a process of co-creation. This requires from all of us navigating uncharted waters to find a common ground between operational relevance and the generic concerns and questions of research. A way ahead may be the creation of shared learning environments, offering room for reflection and continuous improvements – turning the world into a living lab?!

Walking the line… together. While few researchers have been to the field, many have been collecting and analyzing data about the impact of Haiyan, the response and recovery efforts. We have been trying to understand the context, requirements, needs and to improve technology, tools and systems. Most of this work is still fragmented; also in science, data is often not open. We keep advocating data sharing protocols and better interoperability for emergency managers, and seem utterly unable to open up and share ourselves

To make headway in both aspects, we will publish in the coming weeks a series of blog posts about the Philippines. This will still be exploratory and anecdotal, including subjective reports and reflections from our respective standpoints. We believe that to achieve academic rigor, we need to make room for information sharing and engage in a discussion. We hope you join!

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Authors

Bartel Van de Walle has worked on the virtuous circle of sensemaking and decisions in crisis management. For the past 20 years he has worked on information systems for better crisis response in the field and as an associate professor at Tilburg University.

Tina Comes develops systems and tools to support decision makers dealing with complexity and uncertainty. Her work as Associate Professor in ICT at the University of Agder aims at bridging the gap between technology and users.

Together, we are working on improving disaster resilience, since the ability to prepare for, manage and learn from risks and crises has become a prerequisite for sustainable growth in an increasingly complex, uncertain and dynamically evolving world.